WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for 20 January

Your WIRED.co.uk daily briefing. Today, Microsoft will donate $1 billion of cloud computing power to charity, Facebook has added Tor support to its Android app, global fisheries statistics could be underestimating catches by tens of millions of tonnes and more.

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Microsoft has announced that it will be donating $1 billion worth of its Cloud Services -- "measured at fair market value" -- to non-profit organisations and university researchers over the next three years (BBC). This will involve giving researchers and charities access to normally costly services ranging from Customer Relationship Management tools and Office 365 to the virtual hosting and big data crunching capabilities of Microsoft Azure, as well as rolling out "last mile" internet connectivity to poorly connected areas.

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Facebook has announced that users of its Android app will now to able to use Tor to access the social network without revealing their location (The Guardian). The social network had already introduced a .onion address for the desktop browser version of its service at the end of October. Although adding layers of privacy to a social network often associated with oversharing might seem ironic, Tor spokesperson Kate Krauss told The Guardian: "Everybody in the world needs more privacy online and almost everybody is on Facebook. This will allow people to choose whether to share their location or not. For some people, this is convenience. For others it is lifesaving."

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A new study indicates that official figures for the global fishing catch could be out by tens of millions of tonnes (Nature). The paper, published in Nature Communications, shows that figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization don't take into account either discards -- unwanted fish thrown back after they've been killed -- or catches from small-scale and subsistence-level fisheries. The paper's catch-reconstruction techniques are controversial among fisheries researchers, but lead author Daniel Pauly says that it is clear that "the catch of the world is higher than reported."

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ByNicole Kobie

A group of Twitter users who were warned that their accounts had been targetted by "state-sponsored actors" have written an open letter demanding further information from the social network (Motherboard). Although Twitter alerts users if it believes a government has been trying to hack into their accounts, it doesn't provide further information. The users write that: "We expected follow-up reporting by journalists who had read between the lines, had connected these alerts to other similar ones sent by different companies, or had talked to inside sources at Twitter. Nothing. Today, we are as clueless as when this started."

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By comparing modern British genomes with the first complete Anglo-Saxon genome, researchers have found that Anglo-Saxon immigrants contributed 38 percent of the DNA of modern people from East England, and 30 percent of the modern Welsh and Scottish (EurekAlert!) The ancient Anglo-Saxons were genetically very similar to modern Dutch and Danish people. "By sequencing the DNA from ten skeletons from the late Iron Age and the Anglo-Saxon period, we obtained the first complete ancient genomes from Great Britain," said Dr Stephan Schiffels of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Researchers from security firm Perception Point this week uncovered a bug in the Linux kernel which could be exploited by malware to gain OS-level access to an Android device, or on a server, desktop or embedded Linux account with local privileges to gain root access (Ars Technica). The bug, first included in kernel version 3.8 in early 2013, affects the kernel's keyrings facility, which allows encryption keys and authentication tokens to be securely stored and accessed by applications and drivers. Perception Point's researchers write that "while neither us nor the Kernel security team have observed any exploit targeting this vulnerability in the wild, we recommend that security teams examine potentially affected devices and implement patches as soon as possible."

Why Google consuming DeepMind Health is scaring privacy experts

IBM neuroscientist James Kozloski has put forward the hypothesis that the human brain's vast energy consumption -- 20 percent of the body's total -- is the result of the brain constantly looping signals through its neural pathways, a phenomenon he refers to as 'The Grand Loop' (PopSci). Kozloski simulated the loop using IBM's neural tissue simulator, a set of algorithms which mimics the way neurons fire, and says that the model would explain the 90 percent of the brain's energy consumption that is currently unaccounted for. It could also have implications for research into degenerative genetic disorders such as Huntingdon's disease, as a single faulty gene could have major implications for the behavior of the neurons that maintain the loop.

Nasa's Gamma-Ray Imager/Polarimeter for Solar flares -- GRIPS -- team has launched a huge scientific balloon from its Antarctic base to study high-energy radiation released by solar flares. The mission seeks to "pinpoint more precisely the times and locations that produce gamma rays," says Albert Shih, project scientist for the GRIPS mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The helium balloon is the size of a football field and will ride the winds around the South Pole for at least two weeks while making its observations.

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Former Sony Entertainment Online chief John Smedley has launched crowdfunding for Hero's Song, a roguelike pixel-art RPG that stands out from the crowd by having a development team that includes renowned fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss and EverQuest co-creator Bill Trost (VentureBeat). Smedley's PixelImage Games studio has already raised $1 million for the game and hopes to pull in another $800,000 through crowdfunding.

Researchers from the German Aerospace Center have successfully landed a solar-powered UAV on top of a moving car (Gizmodo). The drone's drop into a net on top of a speeding car is surprisingly graceful to watch, and also means that the drone can fly for longer, without being encumbered by the weight of landing gear. The landing is fully autonomous - the car and drone just match one another's speeds of 80kph and the drone uses tracking dots to line itself up and land.

The online Islamic State (Isis) propaganda machine will only be defeated if it can be pushed from public view to the dark web, Google has said. Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, believes that to "recapture digital territory" from the terror cell, its members must fear being caught when they post messages promoting the organisation's cause in public.

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